466.pdf

Media

extracted text
M. Z. HAMM

LESLIE SAWHNY
PROGRAMME
OF
TRAINING
FOR DEMOCRACY
Revised Edition

Bangalore-560034

'ndla

LIBERALISM
By
M. R. Masani

Liberalism is something about which not much is
known or written or discussed in this country. It is
nonetheless a worldwide system of thought and a way
of life which, I think it would be fair to say, domi­
nates the greater part of the civilised world and,
therefore, it should be of some interest to us.
Liberalism has been defined by Hobhouse, the
great historian and political scientist, in the following
way : “Liberalism is a belief that society can safely
be founded on the self-directing power of personality,
that it is only on this foundation that a true commu­
nity can be built. Liberty then becomes not so much
a right of the individual as a necessity of society.”
Prof. Parkinson, the well known author of Parkinson’s
Law, says : “The word liberal means generous or openhanded. But generous with what? With freedom and
political responsibility.”
The Individual

The word ‘Liberalism’ derives from liberty. In
other words, the individual is in the centre of the
picture. Society is there to serve the individual and
not the other way around as certain other systems of
thought like communism or socialism try to make
out.
The essential elements of Liberalism are all per­
vasive and touch every aspect of life. In so far as
matters of the spirit are concerned, tolerance, parti-

cularly tolerance of dissent, is basic. Whether an
issue is religious, communal, regional, national or
pertains to small groupings like caste and linguistic
groups, tolerance of the other point of view and
willingness to argue about it are of the essence of
Liberalism.
This is in striking contrast to the Soviet or
Communist attitude to dissent. The Soviet dictator­
ship has now stooped so low as to declare that any­
one who dissents from their way of life must be mad.
The book by Zhores & Roy Medvadev, A Question
of Madness, tells the sad story of how anyone who
wishes to improve things in Russia is treated as suffer­
ing from “paranoid delusions of reforming society.”
This would be enough to make Karl Marx, with
even his limited stock of tolerance, turn in his grave.
In so far as religion is concerned, Liberalism is
not anti-religious but it is non-denominational and
perhaps sceptical. A good Liberal does not attack
all religions equally as a ‘secularist’ would do. A good
Liberal would tolerate and respect all religions
equally. In that sense, Gandhiji’s attitude to religion
was much more liberal than that of those who call
themselves ‘secular’ and who look at all religions
with an equally malevolent eye. The Indian Con­
stitution is, in that sense, highly liberal and extends
equal respect to all religions and religious
institutions.
Pragmatism

Another basic characteristic of Liberalism is its
pragmatic approach to whatever problem there may
happen to be at a particular time. The Liberal
does not approach any problem with a dogmatic or
preconceived attitude. He is open-minded on all
issues. Thus, for instance, in so far as democratic
socialism is concerned, the Liberal would be quite
prepared to accept as large a dose of State control
2

GSR loo

as the circumstances of a particular country, case
and time may warrant. While holding the view that
competition, consumer preference and the laws of
the market should predominate, the Liberal is flexible
about the exact nature of the mixed economy which
would be desirable in a particular context.
As a result of this, the line between the Liberal
and the Social Democrat has got blurred and no
longer really exists. In England, this phenomenon
was given the name of ‘Butskellism,’ a combination
of what were understood to be the policies of R. A.
Butler of the Conservative Party and Hugh Gaitskel
of the Labour Party. In Germany, this fusion of
Liberalism and Social Democracy resulted in the
Godesberg Programme of the German Social De­
mocratic Party led by Willy Brandt which, for all
practical purposes, accepted the framework of libe­
ralism. I had, on one occasion, published in parallel
columns the corresponding clauses of the German
Social Democratic Programme of November 1959
and the Swatantra Party’s Programme of August
1959. It was amazing how one appeared to be a
translation or paraphrase of the other. Here, for
instance, are two clauses dealing with the structure of
Industry and the limits of governmental intervention
and planning :—
Swatantra Party

“The Party believes that, in the field of produc­
tion, the free choice of the producer and the con­
sumer must be given basic place and importance.
In industry, the Party believes in the incentives
for higher production and expansion inherent in
competitive enterprise, with adequate safeguards
for the protection of labour and against unreason­
able profits, prices and dividends, where there is
no competition or where competition does not
secure the necessary corrective.”
3

German SPD

“The free choice of consumer goods and services,
free choice of a place to work, free initiative for
employers are decisive foundations and free com­
petition an important element of a free economic
policy... .Totalitarian control of the economy
destroys freedom. The Social Democratic Party
therefore favours a free market, wherever free
competition really exists. Where markets come
under the domination of individuals or groups,
however, manifold measures are necessary to
preserve the freedom of the economy. As much
competition as possible, as much planning as
necessary.”
Pluralism

The Liberal is of necessity a pluralist, that is, he
does not accept the predominance of any one line of
thought or dogma or even one class of society. In
the Liberal’s mansion there are many chambers and
there is room for everything. The Liberal, therefore,
believes in a pluralistic society where there are checks
and balances between different organs of govern­
ment such as the executive, the legislature and the
judiciary. In a Federal form of government, there
have also to be checks and balances between the
federal government on the one side and the state
government on the other. In the case of countries
with multi-religions, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual
groups, such as India, the Liberal believes in the pro­
tection of the rights of Minorities. In the conflict
between the individual and the State, there should
be Fundamental Rights for the citizen with an appeal
to the Courts of Law. There should be a separation
of political and economic power. In other words,
the Liberal believes in limited government. ‘Render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto
4

God the things that are God’s’. God, in this case,
is the conscience of the individual.
The Liberal is never a determinist. He never says
that such and such a thing is bound to happen, as
does the Marxist. All he can say is that, on the basis
of a rational analysis, certain things are likely to
result if certain other things happen.
Justice

The Liberal stands for justice for the underdog,
whoever he may be. Thus, he is for equality of wo­
men with men, though he may not be for Women’s
Lib with all its aberrations. The Liberal stands up
for the right of children and decent treatment for
them. So too, the Liberal pleads for sympathy for
the criminal and the odd man out.
Modernism

The Liberal is a modernist. He is an advocate of
change. He welcomes and cheerfully accepts modern
technology with all its implications. He stresses the
role of managerial skills in industry and business and
other walks of life. He accepts the importance of
science in modern society. It is not an accident that
technology only thrives in freedom and, where freedom
is denied to the scientist and technologist, t’here is
stagnation.
In the conflict between modernism on the one side
and obscurantism, whether that of the nation, the
caste or religion on the other, the Liberal is on the
side of modernism and change. The Liberal is not
against tradition. On the contrary, the Liberal res­
pects what is good in the tradition of people and seeks
to build and change on the basis of that tradition.
In that sense, the Liberal is not an incendiary or dis­
rupter but a constructive element of change.
5

“Bread or Freedom ?”

The Liberal rejects the false antithesis between
freedom and bread which the communists and the
fascists always pose. They ask : “Do you want
bread or freedom?” As if we have to choose the
one or the other ! As if, when you have freedom,
you don’t have bread or, to have bread, you must
give up your freedom ! Now this is a huge hoax.
Because actually you don’t get bread except through
freedom. There is no known instance in human
history where a country of slaves got bread. Now,
by bread, we don’t mean only bread. You get that
even in Moscow. By bread we mean the good things
of life—the material values of life, consumer goods,
as we call them. There is no known example in hu­
man history till this day where, by denying people
freedom, you give them a prosperous life. On the
contrary, the Affluent Society comes only where there
is maximum freedom.
Which are the countries where you have the most
bread, to put it like that, that is the best time ? Ob­
viously, the U.S.A, leads, Canada, Australia and
New Zealand come very close, then come the Scandi­
navian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, then
comes Switzerland, then you get West Germany,
France, Italy, Japan and so on. Right down at the
bottom along with us, you get the Soviet Union, ahead
of us, and China below us. In other words, when
you do deny people freedom, you take away their
bread also. That is natural. Why should slaves be
well fed ? Why should any government feed its
slaves well ? The Egyptians, who used slave labour
to build the Pyramids, did not treat them well. They
flogged them until they built the pyramids and died
in the process. It is only the free man who has a
right to ask for bread. Because he has the right, he
has got the strength, he has the vote, whatever you
like to call it.
6

A Free Economy

A free economy therefore means that government
has to play a rather limited and restricted part. Social
control must be limited to a minimum. The whole
idea of control is to interfere with people when some­
thing is going wrong. You stop a man from stealing,
you stop a man from hitting somebody else, you stop
a man from cheating somebody else, you stop an
employer from cheating his worker—that is fair.
But you don’t stop a man from doing something which
he should be doing. So controls are only police
measures to stop somebody from doing something
he should not. The Government should not be like
the mother who told the nanny : “Mary, go and
see what Johnny is doing and tell him not to”! Johnny
should only be stopped when he is really doing some­
thing which he shouldn’t.
The second characteristic of a free society is that
“the consumer is king.” Everything must be done
to serve the needs of the consumer, not of the indus­
trialist, not of the businessman, not of the factory
worker, but of the man who consumes, because he is
the ordinary citizen. We all consume. There is
not a single human being in India today who doesn’t
consume. He would be dead if he didn’t. We con­
sume, you consume, our children consume. Now
what does “the consumer is king” mean ? It means
that the consumer must determine the pattern of
production. The consumer must tell the industrialist
what to produce and what not to produce. The
consumer can do this by his purchasing power, by
the little money in his pocket. The industrialist or
businessman only produces what he thinks will make
a profit. In other words, if there is a demand for a
commodity, you produce it. If there is no demand,
you are a fool if you produce it because nobody will
buy it and you will lose your capital. In this way,
the smallest consumer can determine the pattern of
7

production in a free country.
Some of you, no doubt, go to the races. I go once
a year or two when I am dragged there. There is a
thing called the Tote, on which all the demands of
the consumers, that is the buyers of tickets, are totalled
up and you can say 25 people are backing Horse ‘A’,
75 people are backing Horse ‘B’, 275 people backing
Horse ‘C’ as their favourite. The others are out­
siders. The dividend is paid according to the law
of supply and demand. Now, exactly the same thing
happens in our bazaars. Every time we go shopping,
we cast a vote. As you buy a ticket to back a horse,
so you go to a shop and say “I want Hamam” or “I
want Godrej,” or whatever it is. You cast a vote
for that particular brand of soap against another
brand, just as you vote for me and not for the Congress
Party or vote for the Congress Party and not for me,
or just as you back one horse and not another. Now,
all these preferences for soaps and perfumes, for bread
and biscuits and cakes, and whatever else you like,
are totalled up on the economic tote and, by looking
at the economic tote, the business community and the
industrialists decide what is popular, what is favoured.
They shift their production according to the demand.
Let us take an example of the Monsoon. As you
know, the shops before the Monsoon are filled with
commodities pertaining to the Monsoon, namely,
raincoats and umbrellas. Now, some people take
umbrellas, some people take raincoats. The pessi­
mists take both ! How does the manufacturer know
how many umbrellas and how many raincoats will
be needed ? He watches the demand and he learns
from one monsoon what to produce for the next.
Let us imagine that this year, for some reason—after
all human beings have their own whims—the demand
for raincoats went up tremendously, but umbrellas
got left. It is fashionable to wear a raincoat and not
an umbrella. It is considered old-fashioned and
8

dowdy to have an umbrella. Now what happens ?
The umbrella dealers say : “Oh God, we have had
it. Next year the same thing will happen, perhaps
it will get worse.” They shift. They stop making
so many umbrellas and turn to making more raincoats,
or vice versa. You and I, buying a raincoat or an
umbrella, have shifted the pattern of production in
India. The biggest industrialist has to kow-tow to
our needs. He needs us.
This is what “the consumer being king” means.
It has led to the highest prosperity known in history,
the highest standard of life and also of equality of
opportunity and status. This is a paradox. The
countries where there is greatest equality'—there is
nowhere perfect equality, nor can there be—but wher­
ever there is equality of opportunity and of status, it
is in the capitalist countries. Which is the country
in the world where the worker calls his boss by his
first name ? The American worker never calls his
boss Mr. so and so. He always says Tom or John.
That is the United States. People in Europe are
shocked at this kind of “vulgarity” or lack of good
breeding because they are still class bound. So you
get this strange phenomenon that you get not only
the most prosperity but also the greatest measure of
equality, which is supposed to belong to socialism,
only in so called capitalist, or what I call liberal,
countries.
Socialism

Now, let us turn to socialism, which is the denial
of liberalism. Socialism is the reverse of liberalism.
The Oxford Dictionary defines it as follows : “It is
a principle that individual liberty should be com­
pletely subordinated to the interests of the community
with the deduction that can be drawn from it, namely,
the State monopoly of land and all capital.” That
is, the human being is nothing. The collectivity or
9

community is everything. Man must be destroyed
or used for the good of the community, which is to
make Liberalism stand on its head.
The Labour Party in Britain, which is a very mo­
derate Socialist Party and not a Communist Party,
has in its programme included “the nationalisation
of the instruments of production, distribution and
exchange” as the objective. Now what does this
mean ? The instruments of production are the land
and all factories. All industry and all agriculture
should belong to the Government. Distribution is
trade. So all trades, all shops, should belong to the
Government. And exchange is banking. So all
banks should belong to the Government. And what
remains for anyone else is nothing 1 Only the flat
or the home where you live or the motor car. Now,
the only countries, luckily for socialism, where this
has been tried are the communist countries. The
British Labour Party, although it is often in office,
never tries to carry out its own objective, because it
knows it would be horrible. It would be destroying
liberty and Britain would become another communist
state. So the British Labour people, the socialists,
do not practise socialism. They only practise about
15 per cent of it or less. I once asked Mr. Herbert
Morrison, the well known British Labour leader who
is now dead, how much of industry they could na­
tionalise in England without losing their freedom,
without the House of Commons being abolished and
a Communist dictatorship ruling England. He
thought a little and said : “Well, in England I would
risk about 15 per cent but, if I were you, I wouldn’t
go so far.” Britain is a very strong democratic
country. They have got the tradition of freedom
from the days of Magna Carta. They have got the
“non-conformist conscience” which came as a result
of the Protestant Revolution standing up to the Pope.
Well, as you know, in India we have no non-conformist
10

conscience. We are only too easily prepared to obey
whoever is on top, whether it is the head of the family
at home or the boss in an enterprise or shop or the
Government of the day, whether it is British or Indian.
Now, in India, we are getting well past 15 per cent
Statism already.
Communism

What is the result in the Communist countries ?
Let us take the Soviet Union as an example. Colin
Clark, who is one of the world’s leading economists
and who has written many books on these subjects,
has shown statistically that the rise in the standard
of life in the Soviet Union since the Revolution of
1919 till today has been about the slowest and the
lowest in the world. There is no country where the
rise in the standard of life has not been faster. That
goes all the way from America to Japan and all the
countries.
Even today in Moscow and Russia,
there is very poor housing. Two or three families
have to share a room, exactly like our workers
do, where two sets of parents and children will share
a room in a chawl. This is common practice in Rus­
sian cities even today. A man is considered lucky
if he can get a flat for himself and his family and
that measure of privacy which we all enjoy. Good
clothing is very short, shoes are even scarcer. Every
Russian diplomat or engineer in India, when he goes
back, takes back several suits and several pairs of
shoes, not to oblige his friends but to sell them at a
profit. He makes a huge profit out of this private
trade or blackmarketing.
Agriculture has been the biggest failure in all
Communist countries, because the peasant is very
conservative and loves his land.
Even if it is four
acres, he loves it just as a mother loves her baby,
however small it is. Mr. Nehru once said to me in
Parliament : “Why should the peasant love his land?

He has only got a miserable four acres”. I said to
him : “Think of the mother.
Does she love her
child less because the baby is small and not big or
thin and not fat?” The peasant in India loves his
land even if it is half an acre. He will fight for it he
will die for it, He sometimes stabs his own brother
over a dispute as to dividing that land which the
father has left them.
So the peasants in Russia have simply refused to
co-operate. Stalin killed three million peasants be­
cause they refused to hand over their land and their
cattle. The peasants slaughtered their cattle and
Stalin slaughtered the peasants. It still hasn’t im­
proved anything. The yield per acre of land in the
Soviet Union is among the lowest in the world. With
their tractors and mechanisation, they still can’t get
as much out of an acre as most other countries in the
world.
The highest crops in the world are in Japan and
in Taiwan (the Republic of China), both very small
countries where the farms are small. In Japan and
Taiwan, there is a ceiling of seven acres per head.
No farmer is allowed to keep more than that. Our
Indian average is about four to five acres. Our ceiling
is 30 acres. So they have gone further in dividing
farms into small lots, but they produce from each
acre of land more rice than any country in the world.
Taiwan comes first, Japan comes second, producing
several times what the Soviet Union produces from
its collective farms. The only progress the Communist
countries have made is in armaments and the produc­
tion of steel. Steel—because they want steel for
tanks and aeroplanes and guns. Militarist Com­
munist regimes concentrate on steel so they can occupy
small countries like Tibet and Czechoslovakia. That
is the only index by which the Soviet Union has made
phenomenal progress, building up a big steel industry
which it uses mostly for creating armaments.
12

The Russian people are very bitter about it. They
are not very much behind the Czechs in their desire
for freedom, as we shall see in the coming years.
When Gagarin, the first Soviet spaceman, went into
outer space and came back, the Russians, who have
a sense of humour, joked about it because they could
not do anything else about it. In all dictatorships,
people joke. They joked about Hitler, they joked
about Stalin, they joke about Kosygin. So the Rus­
sians made up a story about Gagarin. The story is
that a foreign correspondent wanted to interview
Gagarin about his space experience. He went to
Gagarin’s country house because in Russia every
rich man or member of the ruling class has a big
country house and a motor car of his own. He went
to the country house of Gagarin, who is a kind of
capitalist in Russia, to interview him. Having mo­
tored several miles, he knocked on the door and a
little girl came out. He said : “Can I speak to
daddy ?” The girl said : “No, Daddy has gone
out to outer space.” He said : “Oh dear what
shall I do ? How long will Daddy be away ?” The
girl answered : “May be he will be back in 4 or 5
hours from outer space.” The journalist thought it
was worth waiting 4 or 5 hours having come into
the country. He said : “All right, I will speak to
mummy meanwhile.” The girl said : “Oh, but she
has gone out too.” The journalist asked : “Where
has she gone ?.” The girl answered : “She has
gone round the corner to the baker’s to stand in the
queue for bread.” “Thats all right” said the re­
porter : “I will wait for her. How long will she
take ?” The girl said : “That will take twice as
long—about 8 hours !” Now in this simple story
that came out of Moscow the Russian people expressed
their bitterness that while millions of roubles were
spent on sending Gagarin into space they have just
13

not enough to eat and have to queue up in long
queues to get a loaf of bread.
There are more inequalities in the Soviet Union
than in Liberal countries. The American technician,
the highest skilled, gets two and a half times the wage
of the American “coolie”, who does the hard manual
work. This is the range of inequality between the
“coolie”, as we call him, and the most skilled techni­
cian or mechanic. In India, the inequality is probably
about 1 to 25,—ten times the inequality in the U.S.
In Jamshedpur it was about 20 to 1 when I was in
Tatas, over ten years ago. Mr. J. R. D. Tata was
trying very hard to bring it down to 16 to 1, being a
very good progressive in his own way. I don’t know
if he succeeded. Now, in the Soviet Union, it can
be 40 or 50 to 1. This gives you an idea of how far
from creating equality this kind of system creates
inequality. And there is a good reason for it. In
the Soviet Union the people with millions of roubles
of income every year pay only 13 per cent as income
tax. It is flat. A clerk pays 13 per cent and the
millionaire pays 13 per cent ! This is called Socialism
in the Soviet Union but not in India. Here they
would call it reactionary.
You might want to know about the Estate Duty.
There are Russians who leave millions of roubles
to their children. You will be interested to know
they do not pay a single rouble of Estate Duty or
Inheritance Duty ! There is no such thing. Now
why does this happen ? This happens because poli­
tical power is being misused by the bosses of the Com­
munist Party, the rulers, to feather their own nests.
That is human nature, and communists are no different
from anyone else. They like to line their pockets
also with the good things of life and money. So what
has happened is that the Commisars are looting the
people as the Tsar used to loot the people. All ruling
classes are apt to pocket more than their fair share
14

of the dividend, and in Russia the ruling class is the
Communist Party. There is no voting, there are no
elections and the Communist Party dictates. So na­
turally political power is used by them to have a good
time.
This has been spelt out by a Communist, Milovan
Djilas, former Vice-President of Yugoslavia, who
has written a little book called The New Class. This
book was published and he was given ten years’ rigo­
rous imprisonment by Tito to punish him for telling
the truth about Communism. He was later released.
Djilas explains how The New Class talk social­
ism and loot the people with a good conscience.
Now in India also it is possible to say that after 20
years of so called Socialism the same things are hap­
pening that have happened in Russia. Indian agricul­
ture is bankrupt. As you know, but for a good Mon­
soon, lots of people would be starving. All industries
are stagnant. The capital market is dead. Almost all
State enterprises are making huge losses. Hindustan
Steel, which is financed by your money—tax payer’s
money—has lost crores of capital. The average
return on your capital, according to our Finance
Minister when he last gave the figure for a selected
range of Government enterprises, was 0.8 per cent.
That is on money invested, you don’t even get one
Rupee back on a hundred ! Now nobody else does
business on this basis. They would be bankrupt and
insolvent long ago. Normally, people expect 12 per
cent return on capital. That they consider to be a
reasonable profit. Many make more. But the
Government of India gives the taxpayer in India less
than 1 per cent on his capital in those industries that
make a profit at all. The result is that we too have
now practically come to the end of our tether. If we
go on like this, we shall not only be bankrupt, there
will be chaos in India in the next few years.
15

Lesson Learnt

Now there are ardent Socialists who wouldn’t have
believed this to be possible five or ten years ago but
have now learnt the lesson. I will cite two of them.
There is Mr. Lee Kwan Yew, the very intelligent
Prime Minister of Singapore, who is a Socialist. He
came to Bombay to meet Indian Socialists some years
ago and he asked a question of them. He said : “It
is pertinent to ask how is it that in Asia, countries
like Japan, Hongkong, Formosa, Thailand and Ma­
laysia, which are bustling free enterprise economies,
have achieved success, while countries professing
Socialism have failed to produce satisfactory results ?”
Another convert is Prof. Kenneth Galbraith, who was
American Ambassador in Delhi and who was then an
ardent socialist and planner in Mr. Nehru’s time.
Last year, he wrote a book called The New Industrial
State. This is what he writes in this book :

“In India and Ceylon, and also in some of the new
African countries, public enterprises have not as
in Britain been accorded autonomy. Here the demo­
cratic socialist prerogative has in effect been fully
asserted. India, in particular, as a legacy of co­
lonial administration, has an illusion of official
omniscience which extends to highly technical
decisions .... The effect in these countries of this
denial of autonomy has been exceeding inefficiency
in operations by the public firms .... In India and
Ceylon, nearly all public owned corporations ope­
rate at a loss. The situation is similar in other
new countries .... One result is that a large num­
ber of socialists have come to feel that public cor­
porations are by their nature, in the words of a
Minister in the Wilson Government, ‘remote, irres­
ponsible bodies, immune from public scrutiny or
democratic control’.”
16

The reason why this should be so is very simple.
The body politic is like our own bodies. It consists
of organs developed by society over the last few thou­
sand years since we were primitive apes or beasts.
Now, as the human society develops, it throws up
institutions. The Joint Stock Company has been
thrown up in the last two hundred years to run busi­
ness. The Government or State has been thrown
up to rule, to maintain order. Our bodies are like
that. We smell through our nose, we eat through
our mouth, we hear through the ears, we breathe
through our lungs, we digest in the stomach and so
on. Now what would happen if we tried to distort
our organs and asked them to do something different
from what they were meant to do ? Supposing we
tried to breathe with our stomach and digest with our
lungs or hear through the nose and smell with the
ear ? What would happen ? It just wouldn’t work.
That is exactly what happens when we try to misuse
an organ of society. Governments were thrown up
by society and civilization to protect the country
from attack, to stop one person from attacking an­
other, to see that justice is done. In other words,
Governments are there to keep law and order, do
justice, protect people, protect the country from attack.
That is where the basic functions of Governments
stop. When Government tries to run a factory and
to produce either penicillin or steel or whatever it is,
it makes a flop because Governments are not made
to make profits or to produce goods. Governments
are not made to produce anything. Governments
are meant to consume things, to keep order and give
you a chance to produce. So state socialism and
communism are a perversion of the laws of social
growth. Therefore they are bound to fail. The con­
clusion to which one is driven then is that we have got
to turn to Liberalism from this barren path.
17

World Liberal Movement

There are liberal parties in most countries of the
world. These parties have come together in an inter­
national institution called the Liberal International
to which I happen to belong. It was established in
Oxford in April 1947. Last September, 1967,1 attend­
ed the 20th Anniversary of the Congress also in Ox­
ford at St. Catherine’s College. At that time a Mani­
festo was adopted. Unfortunately, most of the parties
affiliated to the Liberal International are in Europe,
because Liberalism is very weak in the under-deve­
loped countries of the world. The only parties that
are affiliated from Asia are from Israel, which is a
progressive and liberal country. Even the Japanese
Liberals, who are very powerful and have been in
Government since 1947 or 1948 when MacArthur left,
have not affiliated yet and in our own country, Liberal
parties like my own are very small and very shaky.
The Liberal International has however a group
existing in this country which tries to spread the ideas
of liberalism. It ran a School for Freedom in Delhi
in December 1965. In December 1967 we had a
Seminar in Poona attended by young people from
India, Ceylon and Nepal and in October 1968 we
had a rather more advanced Seminar on “Democracy
and Development” in Coonoor where ten Indians,
ten other Asians and ten Europeans exchanged ideas
on this important subject.
The Old Liberalism

So Liberalism is making a beginning in India. But
this is not the first time that Liberalism has come to
India. It came in the 19th Century also. There
was the old liberalism in India. Its leaders were
Dadabhai Naoroji, Ranade, Gokhale, Ram Mohan
Roy, Surendra Nath Banerjee, whose names you
know. I saw many of them when I was a boy or as
a student, attending the lectures of Srinivasa Sastri.
18

I remember as a boy playing round the feet of Dadabhai Naoroji at Versova where he was a neighbour
of ours. I have seen Dinshaw Vachha, I saw Phirozshah Mehta, I knew Sapru and Jayakar. They have
all gone and the old liberalism has gone also. It
was killed by Mahatma Gandhi. When Gandhiji
came on the scene as a dynamic nationalist following
Tilak and Lajpatrai, he had no use for the old libe­
ralism, because the old liberals were extremely mo­
derate in their opposition to British rule. They were
for Indian self-government. As you know Dadabhai
Naoroji coined the word Swaraj—“Swaraj is my
birthright and I shall have it.” But the method of
fighting was very temperate and very moderate. He
joined Parliament as a Liberal Member. He argued
for India, but he was a constitutionalist. Liberals
are not people who go to the streets, wreck things,
attack people, and so on. Even today they are not.
So, being constitutional, they appeared to be terribly
moderate. As a young man, I was extremely im­
patient with my father and liberals of that type for
being so slow and gentle about the evil of foreign rule.
Even today I am not against nationalism. I have
been a very ardent nationalist in my time. But when
we become free, we don’t need nationalism any more.
It is like the measles. When you grow up, you don’t
have children’s diseases like chickenpox and measles.
Nationalism is a disease of foreign rule. When some­
body is sitting on your chest, you want independence
very ardently. You can’t breathe without freedom
and that is as it should be. But when you are free,
you don’t have to go on talking about your nationalism.
Mature, advanced countries are not very nationalistic.
They don’t need it. Go to Switzerland. They are
a very patriotic people, but they don’t talk about
Switzerland being the most wonderful country in the
world 1 They are wonderful, but they don’t talk
about it. So, as we grow up, there is no need to be
19

juvenile about nationalism. Of course love of the
country must be there. When the country is attacked,
we must rush to its rescue. We must make sacrifices
for it every day. But we don’t want to be chauvinists.
We don’t have to hate foreigners. We don’t have to
throw out missionaries. Nationalism, while a good
thing, has had its day. We can afford to relax on
nationalism.
Socialism has turned out to be a flop. It has been
a failure. More and more people are now turning
against it and more and more will turn against it.
Czechoslovakia is fighting for its right to discard it.
Hungary tried in 1956 and was smashed by tanks.
Indonesia has thrown out its socialist dictator Soekarno
and is now trying another path.
Socialism has failed to deliver the goods. It has
produced neither equality nor a better life for the
masses of the people. I have suggested to you why it
had to be so. The aims of socialism are good. I am
still a socialist in that sense. If you put it to me :
“Do you believe in Lenin’s ‘free and equal society’?” I
will say ‘Yes’. If freedom and equality are the objec­
tives of socialism, I am for it. But when I find that the
weapon that I have used does not create freedom or
equality but creates tyranny and slavery on one side
and inequality and poverty on the other, then I would
be a fool if I stuck to the weapon. I am not that
conservative that I cling to an out-of-date blunder­
buss when the weapon has become obsolete. What I
am trying to say is that the objectives of socialism are
still valid, but the methods are lousy. The methods have
failed. State Planning, nationalisation, collective farm­
ing. These are weapons that have been tried and failed
and only a stupid man hangs on to a weapon when he
knows it can’t-deliver the goods. We have to be true
to the objective, not true to the method.
This I learnt from Mahatma Gandhi with whom I
used to argue as a young socialist. He kept on saying
20

that by doubtful methods, you can’t get a good endEnds and means are meshed, interlinked. The end does
not justify the means. We have seen from experience
that we cannot get the good result of a free and equal
society by injustice, by regimentation, by oppression,
by lies.
The New Liberalism

So the new Liberalism has come to India after the
failure of socialism. It is a fusion of western Liberalism
and Gandhi. When the Swatantra Party was formed
and I was drafting its programme, that is how I put it
in an article in Life magazine—that two streams of
thought had gone into the making of this effort,
Western liberalism as they understand it plus the
teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.
What are these teachings that we graft on to
liberalism or fuse with liberalism ? First, that ends
and means are interlinked: that if we want a decent
society our methods must be decent. We cannot
create a free and equal society by expropriation,
liquidation, lying, as the Communists claim they
can. Secondly, as Gandhiji used to say repeatedly,
“that Government is best which governs the least.”
Minimum Government. The essential thing is to leave
the people free. Thirdly, Trusteeship, that those who
have the good things of life, those who have wealth
must use them for the good of the community. While
we have a good time with what we have, we must not
be devoid of a social conscience or a sense of social
obligation. Gandhiji called it Trusteeship of the rich
for the poor. He said: let every rich man use his wealth.
Certainly, let him keep it. Nobody should take it away.
But let him use it so that he can have a good con­
science that he is doing what he can for those around
who are not so fortunate. Now Vinoba Bhave and
Jayaprakash have given this concrete shape as Bhoodan,
the gift of surplus land, Shramdan, the gift of labour,
21

when you build the road free without asking for pay­
ment, and Sampattidan, when you give a little of your
wealth. I have been giving 10 % of my net income every
year for the last 15 years or so to the Sarva Seva Sangh
of Vinoba and Jayaprakash. Jayaprakash persuaded
—e that my social obligation was to give a share of my
income for providing the landless people with ploughs
or bullocks or seeds on the land that they were given.
Bhoodan is all very' well. But if you give a man with­
er::: any means a plot of land, what is he going to
cnhivate it with ? He needs a plough, two bullocks
and some seed and then of course he might do some­
thing. So to give these landless people a little sampatti or capital, they needed cash.
Liberalism believes in freedom, it believes in demoI was reading an article on Czechoslovakia in
sttme magazine. It mentioned the slogan that was put
np scmswhere in Prague: “Democratisation must lead
to democracy.” So too I would say liberalisation must
lead to liberalism. In a Communist State, democratisatiaD or liberalisation only means that you give a little
.more elbow room to breathe, to talk, to move about.
it dces-c't mean freedom. Democratisation in Commast lead to democracy, otherwise it is only
a half way house.

.’<c-w democracy has its disadvantages. I am not
v-vi. about democracy. I realise its limitations,
it* deficiencies. I am acutely aware of
’-wm e-en in my own Party. Winston Churchill was
a great democrat. He was asked a question about
democracy towards the end of his life. He had tasted
co r true
and the bitterness of democracy. He
.'ac beer. f.a pohtseal exile for many years before World
’•t'
He -a', brought in during World War II, and
det
?-A 'wir. on the scrap heap when World
'• >' H -at over. This is how democracy works. It is
at ■-%. 7/e in this country don’t place our great
rot-. or. the scrap heap and that is why we are going
22

down. After giving a little thought, Churchill said :
“Of all the known systems of government, democracy
is undoubtedly the worst—except for all the others!”
There is a great Liberal in Asia, Carlos Romulo.
He used to be the President of the United Nations
General Assembly for some years as the representative
of the Philippines in the U.N. He was heckled by
some Communist students in the University of which
he was President who asked him for a declaration of
policy. They asked: “Mr. President, are you going left
or right?” Romulo answered: “I am going forward”.
That is the essence of Liberalism. Neither left nor
right, but right ahead.

23

e<!‘,'on °f ^ie Text of a Speech delivered by Mr. M. Ral “ training course organised by the Leslie Sawhny
Programme of Training for Democracy.

Re. One

Programme by. Alyind A' Deshpande for the Leslie Sawluty
Street, Ballard p,. ,n’nS for Democracy, Orient House, Manga!
ExanUner'^f5^. Bombay 1 a«d Panted by F. Wicsinger at the
css, Dalal Street, Bombay 1.

Position: 432 (12 views)